The first two are those that are in your control: website content and settings. But the third – external references – is not in your control.

External references are very simple. They’re based on the links that lead to your site from other websites. If you receive links from a site with a high reputation, this can have a positive effect on your SEO. If you have lots of links from the same site, Google knows you’re trying to beat its system and rates you negatively. The links that you receive are important.

For the most part, these things are outside of your control. But there are certain things you can do to increase your chances of external references giving you a good SEO ranking.

Relationships

The importance of external references also increases the importance of valuing your relationships. In that sense, cultivating relationships can actually assist you with your SEO.

In fact, this is often a strategy used by newer websites looking to build up their SEO. The idea is to build relationships with others in the industry. If you’re building a blog, you’d want to connect with other people writing on blogs similar to yours. That way your content might be relevant and valuable to their readers – and then they can link to you.

When this happens, it’s not only great for your SEO rankings, but you’re also getting more traffic.

Quality Content

The quality level of the content on your site has a direct impact on your SEO. We’ve already mentioned that.

But the content quality also affects your external references and the reason why is simple. Other sites are more likely to link to your site if it has useful, quality content. Basically, you’re more likely to receive external links if you provide value. It’s that simple.

Traffic

This tip is simple. If you get more traffic on your website, you’re more likely to have somebody find it and link to it. So, in order to improve SEO, it helps to focus on getting people on your site.

And then you can grow using the compound effect – with each new person you get on your site, you increase the likelihood of getting the next after them. It’s easier to get your 1,000th visitor than it is to get your 5th. Once you have 1,000 visitors, you’re more likely to receive links. And that will boost your SEO.

Of course, this does raise the paradox of needing to gain traffic to improve SEO and needing to improve SEO to gain traffic. But you can still focus on gaining traffic from other means.

All of these are important things to consider when attempting to boost your SEO. You still can’t control external references, but at least you’re improving your odds.